3) Leave a comment (This step is necessary so that we can choose winners from the list of usernames assigned to the comments).

And that's it! Three entries will be randomly chosen when Mage's Initiation gets greenlit and this contest will remain open until that time. Comments/votes that existed before the contest was announced will also be eligible to win.

We need all the votes and comments we can get, so please help us out by upvoting and spreading the word to your friends with Steam accounts and getting them to do so as well!

Second Prize: Two runners-up will each be gifted one game of their choice (of any value) to their Steam account.

Mage's Initiation has detailed pixel art characters, so they are quite time-consuming to animate in even this resolution. I'd hate to think how long they'd take if we were using 800x600 or higher! But either way, 640x480 is more than 4 times the detail level of 320x200, so although the backgrounds are in the same style as our KQ games, they are also more detailed and crisp. We'll get some proper screenshots posted soon.

Yeah, the collectibles will be great! Eriq is like a master of producing and printing high-quality materials like this. The Mage's Initiation poster will also be a treat; it's one of my favourite drawings for any of the games we've done. The reason for the early pre-order is to guage the level of interest for such collectibles. They're not cheap to produce, so hopefully we'll hit a certain number of pre-orderers so that we can make the entire package really shine.

Actually, sorry, my previous statement isn't quite correct. The game was designed at 640x480 but it runs at 1280x960, since the 2x-filter is necessary to run it with all the details at their optimal settings. Just like the new 3.0 version of Al Emmo, this makes the character sprites more well-defined and clearly detailed when scaled-down to small sizes on the screen.

So, technically, it's 640x480, but detail-wise, you get the benefits of 1280x960 when sprites are scaled down.

Now, you can actually run it at plain 640x480 mode, but it doesn't look great, so I would always recommend the D3D driver and 2x-filter combo.

Mage's Initiation looks amazing and it is exactly the type of game I think AGD (or Himalaya) should be making. Hopefully this will be the start of a new series along the lines of Quest For Glory. I appreciate all the work you have done on the classic Sierra games and look forward to a brand new adventure!

This looks awesome, I must admit I haven't bought any of your games yet mostly because I love fantasy and sci-fi type of scenarios but it finally seems you've struck a chord with me, and I'm definitely pre-ordering this, that's definitely the type of Limited Edition stuff I will want to own! (and tack all over my walls)

I do have one question though which might be too early to answer, will the game be priced similarly to Al Emmo? I'm presuming at least that the Limited Edition will be slightly higher which is fine I just like to know in advance so I'm sure to have the money when it arrives!

I think it's ingenious how the KQ3 poster blends in all those elements from the game. I love those kinds of montage posters! Your QFG2 poster was very good, but I like this one so much more!

That reminded me of the various comics that fans would submit to the Sierra newsletter (back in the 80s and early 90s). One person made a nice collage drawing with a screaming Gwydion in the center, surrounded by bandits, pirates, and an overlooming wizard...

No wide-screen option, unfortunately. At the time of starting development, the AGS engine didn't support these kinds of resolutions. However, we have very cool parallax scrolling foregrounds in nearly every game screen for this title. This really adds a lot to the magical atmosphere and setting. Take a look at Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga to get a rough idea of the effect I'm referring to:

Instead of looking at static, flat, and unchanging 2D backgrounds in each screen, this gives them the element of illusion and 3D depth. It's something that I don't think has been tried in an Adventure/RPG game before.

As for the cost of the Limited Edition, I'm sorry to say that we don't have any accurate ideas at this stage. We really wanted to get the pricing confirmed before we put up the Mage's Initiation promo page for the game, but doing so, we would have delayed the opportunity to cross-promote/announce the game to coincide with King's Quest III's release. We want all of these items to be high-quality, custom-cut collectibles that don't skimp on the details. Anybody who owns a copy of Eriq's QFG2 poster knows how much effort he went to get them printed in cinema stock at Paragraphics and shipped in tubes to prevent them from being creased. We want to put the same amount of attention and care into the Mage's collectibles and make them high quality, but not so expensive that nobody will be able to afford a Limited Edition copy of the game. Oh yeah, and the packaging design will be very nice, too.

All of these factors mean that we still need to source the best prices for everything. We'll keep pre-orderers up-to-date on all this via mailouts, though. We'll announce the Limted Edition price and show images of the collectibles well before the game starts selling, so that people will have time to save for it. You can also request removal from the pre-order list at any time.

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